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In advance of Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated film about Abraham Lincoln, Jonathan Kay takes the measure of America’s most revered president:

On the lists of America’s most admired presidents, three names always appear: George Washington, FDR and Abraham Lincoln. Each is revered for delivering America from some epic threat — British colonial domination, the Great Depression, and the Civil War respectively. But of the three, only Lincoln has been transformed by myth into something approximating a modern superhero: a brawny mallet-wielding rail-splitter and cabin-builder who followed the call of national destiny, and saved his country by force of will. The 2012 film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was, of course, offered in the spirit of satire. Yet even so, it is difficult to imagine such a movie being made about any other president. James Buchanan, Bachelor Scourge of the Undead just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

And so it is fascinating to revisit 1861’s first months, before the U.S. Civil War began, and examine the way in which Lincoln was depicted by America’s press: The image of rank indecisiveness that emerges is the very opposite of manly courage that has become part of American political folklore.

In early 1861, following the proclamation of the Confederate States of America at the Montgomery Convention, president-elect Lincoln “seemed to hide from the unfolding events, staying safe at home in Springfield and uttering nary a word in public about the crisis,” writes historian Adam Goodheart in his extraordinary 2011 book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening. “One cartoon in Harper’s Weekly depicted a cretin-faced president-elect, empty whiskey glass in hand, cracking up at one of his own jokes as a funeral cortege passed behind his back, its crape-shrouded coffin inscribed ‘Constitution’ and ‘Union.’ (The caricature was unfair in at least ne respect: Lincoln was a staunch teetotaler.)”

It’s quite true that Lincoln did spend those crucial weeks doing little of any political import. Yet in retrospect, his refusal to act decisively during this period — or even to make strong pronouncements on the crisis — can be seen as a mark of his character and intelligence.

Like all important historical events, the U.S. Civil War seems inevitable in retrospect: a bloody, but necessary, sorting out of the hopelessly contradictory social contract created by the Founding Fathers, who’d celebrated individual freedom even as they embedded the evil of slavery in their constitutional blueprint. And yet, war was not inevitable at all — not in 1861, at any rate. The nation, after all, had made messy compromises over the slavery issue before — in 1820 and 1850, not to mention the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787. And it was hardly outlandish for Lincoln, or anyone else, to think that 1861 would mark nothing more than yet another messy fudge on the issue of human bondage.

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Goodheart sketches out America’s national frame of mind on (what turned out to be) the eve of war: agitated, apocalyptic, confused and fearful. Far from seeking to impose any grand design on a fragmented America, Lincoln wisely did nothing, and waited.

It was a period marked by longshot initiatives, put forward by desperate patriots as a means to save the union. One plan would have freed all the nation’s slaves gradually between 1860 and 1890, at a rate of 3.333% per year. Another, put forward by Gen. Winfield Scott, would have turned the United States into a sort of four-part Yugoslavia, with separate “unions,” headquartered in Albany, NY, Columbia, S.C., Alton, Ill., and an (unspecified) township on the west coast. The so-called Crittenden Compromise, put forward by influential Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden in December, 1860, would have amended the Constitution in five different ways so as to protect the institution of slavery — plus a sixth super-amendment specifying that “No future amendment of the Constitution” would be able to reverse the other five. Less ambitiously, the mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, proposed to turn his city into a sort of North American Singapore, an independent trading republic that he wanted to christen “Tri-Insula.”

These ideas all seem somewhat ridiculous in hindsight. But they did not seem ridiculous then. And Lincoln would have been justified in imagining that his job as President would be to preside over the implementation of one or another of these notions, a task that would have earned him a place in the history books not much greater than that of, say, Millard Fillmore.

Then came the moment of truth — when Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. The war was on, and Lincoln — as many authors have noted — had engineered its origins to his side’s advantage.

This was no “War of Northern Aggression” (though that name persisted on the southern side for some time, along with “War for Southern Independence”). As Fort Sumter was made to show in miniature, it was a struggle, led by Lincoln, to defeat an aggressive revolution (not merely a peaceful act of “secession”) that aimed at breaking up the United States. As with all savvy leaders, Lincoln’s first order of business was defining his fight in terms that gave him the moral advantage. Only once he’d taken the time and care to do so properly did he unleash the dogs of war.

Looking past all the larded on schoolbook mythology that has accumulated over the years, there is an important lesson in leadership here. We romanticize great leaders as those who grab the reins hard, imposing their will on the world as a matter of reflex. But Lincoln shows that such qualities are useful only when combined with patience and humility. Had Lincoln been goaded on to reckless action by the cartoonists and critics of 1861, he would have stumbled into war on very different terms than he did at Fort Sumter. In which case, the label of “Northern Aggression” might have stuck, pushing more marginal border areas and pacifist-minded northerners into the camp of southern appeasement.

Recall that, on the eve of war, the South had grand plans afoot. As Goodheart notes, in early 1861, South Carolina’s governor was promising his people that, once freed from “the Union’s dead carcass,” he would “reopen the slave trade, officially declare white men the ruling race,” and enforce the death penalty upon anyone espousing abolitionism. But not for Lincoln’s brilliant choreographing of the Civil War’s origins, such dark, racist reveries might have unfolded.

At the very least, no one would be watching movies about America’s 16th president fighting the zombie hordes.

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Lincoln: The patient saviour

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